During our work with the Face the Facts initiative, we had the opportunity to experiment with some of our traditional town meeting tools in online and TV broadcasts. As we were doing this work, we noticed that many public affairs programs (either on TV or online) weren’t utilizing all of the available tools to make programs as interactive and engaging as possible. In light of this, AmericaSpeaks decided to explore this area further for its potential to create large scale opportunities for citizen engagement.

As part of this work, we have done a lot of research on digital tools and held two convenings for journalists and technologists. The conversations focused on the work that broadcast journalists have done to promote citizen engagement and the challenges and opportunities of expanding their engagement work. We are lucky to have heard from various voices within the field, including print journalists, broadcasters, producers, social media curators, and numerous technologists.

Our largest convening took place on April 12 in the AmericaSpeaks offices. During the meeting, AmericaSpeaks staff reviewed the principles of civic engagement, which we use to help guide our engagement practice, and discussed ways that those principles could be implemented in a broadcast environment. We also explored journalistic principles and some of the available digital tools available for online engagement. This overview helped set the stage for an in-depth conversation about the potential interactions between these fields and how they can be leveraged to enrich our nation’s democratic practice.

AmericaSpeaks is producing a report on the outcome of these conversations for one of our funders, the Democracy Fund. This report will present the current convergence of these three areas and outline potential experimentation to help further understand citizen engagement within the broadcast environment. So far, our work in this area has been an amazing learning opportunity. Not only are we able to interact with interesting journalists and technologists, but we are also able to help others understand the importance of meaningful civic engagement.

Two evaluations of the U.S. Open Government Partnership National Action Plan were released in March. The White House released its self-assessment report, and OpenTheGovernment.org released a report produced by a coalition of over 30 civil society organizations.

The National Action Plan included 26 commitments. The civil society report gives the administration good marks for fulfilling most of these specific commitments, but is critical that most of the commitments themselves did not push us very far towards the broader goals of open government.

According to Patrice McDermott, Executive Director of OpenTheGovernment.org, “The Administration should be commended for taking good first, if often small, steps forward on a number of issues. Achieving the greater goal of transforming government to be open and accountable to the public, though, will require the proverbial giant leap.”

I am willing to give the administration a passing grade for round one, given that this was a new initiative and an untested process. However, the civil society report is on target in expecting the administration to be more aggressive in round two. An important step now is a more open and collaborative process for drafting an ambitious round two plan. To that end, the report reminds the administration to be brave and to set the bar higher, even higher than they might be able to achieve, because bold visions inspire action.

The dialogue and deliberation community should not be shy about trying to get our voice heard on the importance of citizen participation, but we need to come to the table with an openness and readiness to give constructive input on different forms of citizen engagement, especially online engagement. We need to understand the uniqueness and complexity of the federal government and national policy. The community also needs to be prepared to defend its suggestions and criticisms with substantial data and analysis.

Building a bigger space for citizen participation within open government and the White House approach to citizen engagement is an uphill battle. We need to work hard and take some giant leaps of our own, which for me includes letting go of some of my own assumptions about citizen engagement, and looking at alternative approaches. What is most important to us? Where can we make a difference? What can we let go of in order to achieve something?

The White House and the coalition of civil society coordinated by OpenTheGovernment.org are getting ready to work on round two. Now is the time to get involved. As we saw in round one, the setting of commitments was the most important step. Loftier commitments now will lead to greater progress later.

In March of this year, AmericaSpeaks produced a visioning and goals workshop for the city of Flint, Michigan. The meeting was part of the city’s comprehensive planning effort and focused on reshaping the economy and improving quality of life for residents. Jim Richardson was central to success of the meeting, where he served as co-chair of the Flint Master Planning Steering Committee (along with Bob Wesley), facilitator recruiter, and table facilitator.

In his role as Steering Committee co-chair, Jim tried to anchor the city’s planning process in the community’s needs and ensured that the public was engaged in the visioning and goals process. Jim summarized the public’s role in the process by saying, “forming a new vision and goals for our city is a key step toward our renewal and the vision and goals have to be embraced by everyone who has a stake in our community.”

Jim was also able to involve community members in his capacity as facilitator recruiter. Working with his wife Jane, he found people with facilitation experience in the Flint area and asked them to help. At the end of the day, “the process was very successful for Flint. We arrived at a common vision and goals for our future… I was delighted to enable a group of ordinary neighbors and friends to have a voice because that happens so rarely in our communities.”

Jim is no stranger to community engagement. Before retiring, he worked in social work community organizing and administration, and spent 22 years as the CEO of a Planned Parenthood affiliate. Though Jim is now retired, he continues to be very engaged in his community, serving on the board of the Urban League, Flint branch of the ACLU and as a trustee of the Flint District Library. Jim lives in Flint with his wife Jane. They have five adult children, three grandchildren and “are committed to the transformation of our city and determined to do what we are able to offer toward achieving a better quality of life for all.”

Over the past nine months we have been working with the Center for Media Innovation at George Washington University on a project called Face the Facts. The initiative aimed to bring more civil and fact based discussion into our national political dialogue. In the run up to the election, the project provided voters and interested individuals with facts to help them better understand important issues. After the election, the conversation turned to governance, where we explored the role that facts play (or don’t play) in the actual work of governing.

Since July of 2012, Face the Facts has produced over 200 daily fact sheets and over 8,000 people have received the daily facts email. The daily facts were also made available to several large media companies, including the McClatchey-Tribune, the Journal Register, and the Huffington Post, which collectively reach tens of millions of people. The most popular fact, on tax complexity, was viewed over 47,000 times and shared over 350 times on Twitter. Check out this Face the Facts infographic to learn more about the facts behind the facts. As part of our work, AmericaSpeaks created discussion guides, lead Google Hangouts on the facts, and helped Face the Facts create interactive live events.

It was an exciting opportunity for AmericaSpeaks to learn from the world of broadcast journalism and to explore new and innovative digital tools, like Spreecasts and Hangouts. We worked with a great team from George Washington University and loved learning something new each day.

While daily facts are no longer being produced, facts are still being sent out less regularly (for example on Earth Day), so stay tuned for more updates. Check out this video to hear more from the Face the Facts team on their experience with the project.

On March 13, AmericaSpeaks produced a large visioning and goals workshop for the city of Flint, Michigan, which was part of their first comprehensive planning effort in 50 years. This was one of our larger 21st Century Town Meetings of the past year.

People often ask us, why is it important to do large scale town meetings? We have lot of reasons. First, people are moved when large numbers of people work together. The media pays more attention. Public officials listen more carefully when they are hearing from lots of people. Citizens themselves appreciate the feeling that they are part of something larger. They appreciate that other citizens want this, and that the government officials want to hear from them. Watch this 1 minute news clip for proof of all this:

Hundreds come together for Flint’s master plan

Another reason for large-scale town meetings is that you need a large group of people to get a diverse range of perspectives and to ensure that everybody feels that they had the opportunity to participate. This is when the true power of crowdsourcing on public policy issues can be achieved: a large number of ideas, created by a large number of diverse perspectives, gathered, organized and prioritized in an informed, facilitated and open manner.

Just in case you doubt an AmericaSpeaks 21st Century Town Meeting is a powerful example of crowdsourcing, let’s look at the numbers from the Flint meeting:

• Over 400 participants gave 4 hours and over 50 volunteers gave about twice that much. That equals 2,000 hours of community service.
• Those participants sat at 40 tables and spent 2 hours in small group discussion. At a total of 80 hours, that is a lot of dialogue.
• Those table discussions produced comments totaling over 43,000 words captured in computers. This is a rich source of data that would have required hundreds and hundreds of flip chart sheets.
• Using keypad polling to answer questions about themselves and their priorities, participants provided over 8,000 data points that can be cross-tabbed and analyzed in many different directions. And that is not counting the 3,000 data points collected as part of the trivia quiz.

The 400 participants were not a perfect representation of Flint’s demographics, but they were not that far off either. The meeting was a little light on young and low income residents. However, with 24% of participants earning $25K or less, that demographic definitely had a voice at the meeting. Look here at the preliminary report for more details on the participants and the crowdsourced results.

Given the importance of crowdsourcing online, this has caused me to revisit the idea of what the dialogue and deliberation community has to offer ideation tools like UserVoice and crowdsourcing activities more generally. Too often, a crowdsourcing site is created, participants are encouraged to participate, and then the participants and the process are left to their own devices. Even when the number of participants is large (many times it is not), the ideas generated can be all over the place and not always relevant to what the organizers initially wanted.

Organizers are hoping the tool will do the engagement for them, but they are not engaging themselves. It would be a little like calling a public meeting, getting people in the room, putting up a powerpoint slide with a discussion question and a few ground rules and then sitting in the corner and waiting to see what happens. Unless it is a carefully designed Open Space session, this won’t end well. And even Open Space requires a lot of facilitation.

Here are some engagement guidelines for online crowdsourcing from our work in town meetings and our experience with crowdsourcing and ideation. If you believe you want to use a crowdsourcing tool, consider the following:

• Strategic Links: think carefully about the link between public input and decision-making. What are the decisions that need to be made, and what sort of public input will help make those decisions?
• Informed Participation: look for ways to help participants better understand the policy issue. Have them watch a 5-minute video that helps them understand the context and particulars. Provide them with short, accessible bits of information.
• Outreach: put most of your resources in outreach if you want a large and diverse group of participants. This is not an easy task. Online, you might need to get 1,000 people to visit your site to get 100 people to take part in an activity. To get 1,000 people to visit your site, you might need to get noticed by 100,000 people or more. If you can’t do that, you might not get much traffic to your online forum.
• Facilitation: once your ideation forum is up and running, don’t just sit and watch. Facilitate. Look for where the energy is among the participants and pose questions to challenge assumptions. Encourage people with different points of view to consider each other’s side. All of this is easier said than done in the online world, but we need to start experimenting and see what really works.
• Create time constraints: design your forum with some specific questions that need to be discussed over a specific period of time, support that process, and then bring it to an end. Report the results and let people know how their input is affecting planning and decision-making. Don’t leave the forum open forever. Set it aside, and then bring it back when you need it again.

We need to recognize Internet tools for what they are. They have incredible power and potential. Many are changing the way that people communicate and interact with each other and with government. They are in many cases much cheaper than traditional face-to-face methods. But they cannot do all the work on their own. They still require a good amount of support and other resources to make them work.

The 21st Century Town Meeting in Flint was no small effort. It cost a good deal of time and money. However, it produced a significant amount of participant and prioritized ideas. As we look for ways to do more of this online, let’s not expect to avoid all these costs, let’s look at what it takes to really do this effectively.

Social media can transform debates, inform discussions and, as we saw with the Arab spring, help spread democracy. And information and science have a key role to play in democracy (hence the new Center for Science and Democracy at the Union of Concerned Scientists). Scientists working for government agencies such as NASA, the FDA, the Environmental Protection Agency, and the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration have a lot to contribute to discussions about the science-based challenges we face. Unfortunately, agency policies combined with a culture of timidity are often constraining individual government scientists from jumping into social media.

While there are some notable exceptions (the Occupational Health and Safety Administration actually cancelled its Twitter account), many agencies themselves are embracing new ways of communicating. NASA has 3.7 million Twitter followers, and millions watched the Mars Rover landing via Ustream. The U.S. Geological Survey uses Twitter to send earthquake alerts. NASA had a Google+ Hangout with astronauts aboard the International Space Station. The CDC used zombies to highlight the importance of disaster preparedness in a viral novella. NIH allows employees to use social media to recruit medical study participants. Departing State Department tech visionary Alec Ross recently said that State reaches 15 million people daily in 11 languages through its 200 Twitter accounts. This is great stuff.

For individual scientists who work for government agencies, however, it’s an entirely different story.

It’s easy to find academic scientists with significant Twitter followings. Scientists such as Neil deGrasse Tyson are ambassadors for science and bring significant attention to their home institutions, too.

Yet it’s considerably more difficult to find government scientists who list their agency affiliations and tweet freely. In general, they have been considerably more reticent to wade into the social media world.

We wondered why. So we graded the social media policies at federal government agencies and departments (we also analyzed agencies traditional media policies, discussed here, as a follow up to a 2008 UCS report). We focused on the ability of scientists to communicate their expertise with the public. We looked for the following characteristics:

• Clarity and consistency: Is the policy publicly available? Does it specify to whom the policy applies and in what venues?
• Protection of free speech rights: Does the policy distinguish between the rights of a scientist in a personal capacity vs. his or her official capacity, and guarantee the right of scientists to express personal views in a personal capacity?
• Tone: Does the policy include language that promotes openness?
• Correction of errors: Does the policy allow scientists to correct inadvertent scientific errors in official agency social media posts?
• Consideration of risk: Does the policy identify the inherent risks associated with engaging the public through social media?

We found significant variance, suggesting that while some agencies have a long way to go, others have proven that agencies can guide their employees on social media without infringing on their free speech rights.

Some federal agencies, such as the National Institutes of Health, USGS, and the EPA, have developed social media policies that adequately guide their employees on social media use. Other agencies, such as the USDA, have overly restrictive policies that discourage communication and prohibit employees from providing an agency affiliation on social media platforms.

Other agencies, such as the Nuclear Regulatory Commission, the FDA, and the CDC don’t even have a policy at all. These agencies ignore the world of social media at their own risk. It behooves a federal agency to develop a social media policy, as much for its own sake as for the sake of its scientists.

Clearly, the agencies with poor or no social media policies should step up their game. And the continued reticence of scientists who work for agencies with good policies to use social media while listing their professional affiliation suggests that even these agencies need to be more proactive in encouraging their employees to communicate.

While social media does not yet drive a majority of news, it allows the public to be engaged, to be part of the discussion in a way that mere reports and announcements can never do. Federal scientists are uniquely positioned to engage in public policy discussions, as they often possess both technical knowledge and familiarity with government policies and practices that can inform their opinion on local, state, and national science policy issues. Communication barriers make it more difficult to show citizens the value of the federal science that they pay for.

Hearing directly from scientists can break down barriers between government agencies and the public. It makes subverting the science for political purposes that much harder by decentralizing communications and giving the public a better idea of the science being considered in policy decisions. Strong policies are the first line of defense against political interference in federal science.

We had a fascinating experience last week that challenged us in the use of our model. We were invited in by the Center for Excellence in Public Leadership at George Washington University to facilitate the majority of the 3rd day of a 4 day leadership capstone that they were conducting for the Natural Resources Conservation Service (part of U.S. Department of Agriculture).

The Capstone brought together three leadership cohorts from the agency to synthesize, practice and apply the skills and competencies about leadership towards a real-world problem: drafting a new framework from which to develop and launch new landscape conservation initiatives for the agency to consider using going forward.

What was the key challenge for AmericaSpeaks? We typically develop the design for our town meetings and summits well in advance of a big meeting, ideally beginning that process 8-10 weeks before the meeting convenes. In this case, although we came in with some notions of what we might do for day 3, we didn’t begin the design process until we were onsite on day 2 at the same time as the cohorts were participating in a number of intensive learning and evaluation exercises, even in the same room!.

We worked with capstone faculty for about 4.5 hours that afternoon and then finalized all of our materials that evening. The next morning, we conducted all our necessary briefings and trainings and then ran our town meeting process for a four hour afternoon session and a 90 minute evening session. It was exhausting and exhilarating!

The result? The full group of 70 participants came to agreement on the key components of a new framework that would guide future landscape initiatives. The following morning, three presenters, one from each cohort, presented to a leadership team of nearly a dozen agency leaders. The presentation went so well that the leadership team has asked to the group to provide a more in-depth report shortly to allow this proposed framework to move forward to implementation in 2013.

The whole experience was rewarding because of the critical nature of many of the landscape initiatives the agency is currently leading, including saving the habitat of the sage grouse in the western U.S. and saving the longleaf pine forests in the southern U.S. Hopefully this new framework will lead to even more successful, public-private landscape conservation initiatives in the future.

Democracy is founded on robust dialogue, but somewhere along the line, politics replaced sex as the one thing in America we don’t discuss in mixed company even amongst friends and family. Increasingly, political pundits dictate the tenor of our national conversation and we have allowed divisive catch phrases to supplant genuine dialogue. One filmmaker–a mother of two teenagers– is traveling across the United States with a star-spangled table asking people to sit down with her and share their political beliefs.

Bring it to the Table Asks: Why Do You Believe What You Believe?

By Julie Winokur, Executive Producer, Bring it to the Table

After my 17-year-old son accused me of being “intolerant” and “narrow minded” with regard to politics, I was so impacted by his statement that rather than continuing to be part of the problem, I decided to become part of the solution. During the 2012 election cycle, I launched Bring it to the Table and set out across the country on a mission to listen and to mobilize others to do the same.

Bring it to the Table is a participatory online platform, webisode series and community engagement campaign designed to bridge the political divide and strengthen our democracy. This innovative, cross-platform brings citizens together around the political issues that normally tear us apart.

I launched Bring it to the Table because I was saddened by our nation’s divisive politics and the disservice it does to our democracy. I wanted to be a fly on the wall during other people’s dinner conversations, but since that would have been difficult to achieve, I decided to literally bring my table to the people. We are traveling to communities and public places across the country to ask citizens to sit down and speak candidly about their political beliefs in a non-confrontational setting.

Since filming began in early 2012, my team and I have conducted 120 interviews in select barbershops, bookstores, churches, the RNC, the DNC, dog parks, bars, senior centers and other locations. I want to hear from you: Why do you believe what you believe?

What makes this interactive documentary film project extraordinary is the spectrum of beliefs that defy podium sound bites and partisan assumptions. Viewers are captivated when they learn the stereotypes they assumed, are not accurate.

Bring it to the Table actively fosters the cross-pollination of voices and ideas. It is not intended to change anyone’s ideology or political affiliations, but rather to encourage respect, understanding and genuine dialogue. Discovering shared values and concerns can lead not only to collaborative actions between individual Americans, but it could inspire politicians to do the same.

Have a seat and join the conversation at:

http://www.bringit2thetable.org/

To learn more, please visit http://www.facethefactsusa.org/conversation/

If you are interested in facilitating paired discussions, please visit our facilitation sign-up.

“AmericaSpeaks’ approach and methodology is thoughtful, inclusive and purposeful in getting to shared responsibility – whether that’s through community dialogue or an alliance of organizations. I really appreciate that.” As Lisa has moved through her career in non-profit management, she has repeatedly returned to a cornerstone of the AmericaSpeaks design process: cross-sector partnerships. “Cross-sector partnerships are in vogue now but, in my experience, leaders don’t fully appreciate the investment needed to form and support them and have trouble staying committed to the process. It requires being attuned to a variety of perspectives, making deliberate choices that enable collaboration and being willing to adapt to changing circumstances. It also takes time.”

Lisa has been impacted by her experiences with AmericaSpeaks, especially her work on ConvergeUS. “I’ve become a much better strategist after being on the ConvergeUS design team with Steve and Janet. I’m learning to trust my instincts and ask tough questions because ultimately this is in the best interest of any project. I hope to find a position in an international development setting where I can use these skills.”

Lisa currently lives in New York City, but is hoping to move overseas this year to do humanitarian work. She is also a practicing yoga instructor and studies French.